Network Solutions seizes over 700 domains registered to Syrians

Domain names pointed mostly to sites hosted in Damascus taken under embargo rules.

While Syria's Internet connection is back up, many of the sites hosted in Damascus have lost their domain names. As Brian Krebs of Krebs on Security reports, the domain registrar Network Solutions LLC has taken control of 708 domain names in the .com, .org, and .net top-level domains registered to Syrian organizations. The organizations affected by the seizure include the state-supported hacker group Syrian Electronic Army.

Usually when there's a domain name seizure, it's the work of government agencies like Immigrations and Customs Enforcement or the FBI, or domains are shut down with the help of US Marshals as part of a court-sanctioned seizure related to malware. But in this case, Network Solutions appears to have seized the domains in question without coordinating with federal authorities, though its action was guided by federal regulations—domain name registration is one of the services explicitly banned in US trade sanctions enacted against Syria last year. Network Solutions has marked the seized domains with the notation "OFAC Holding," indicating they were taken over in accordance with regulations propagated by the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, a unit of Treasury's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.

The vast majority of the seized domains were pointed at IP addresses assigned to the Syrian Computer Society. As we've reported previously, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who was an Army doctor and ophthalmologist before being groomed to take over for his father, was head of the Syrian Computer Society in the 1990s. He became president in 2000. The Syrian Computer Society acts as Syria's domain registration authority and regulates the Internet within Syria, and is also believed to be connected to Syria's state security apparatus. The Syrian Computer Society registered .sy domain names for the Syrian Electronic Army's servers, giving the hacker group a national-level domain name (sea.sy) rather than a .com or other non-government address, signifying its status as at least a state-supervised operation.

The Syrian Electronic Army has carried out a series of hacks of news organizations' Twitter accounts—in one case posting a message about a bombing at the White House that sent the stock market tumbling briefly. More recently, the SEA took over a somewhat less critical Twitter account belonging to The Onion.

In fact another reason not to do business in the USA. It costs LESS for ebay.com sellers from China to ship many items to the USA than it costs to mail the item within the USA. Now USA sellers will have to collect sales tax creating another reason US companies are losers. Once a domain registered in the USA is unsafe the government will have created another class of losing American companies. Too bad the government couldn't stop with the thousands of reasons it lets us know what it thinks of anyone trying to run a business.

In fact another reason not to do business in the USA. It costs LESS for ebay.com sellers from China to ship many items to the USA than it costs to mail the item within the USA. Now USA sellers will have to collect sales tax creating another reason US companies are losers. Once a domain registered in the USA is unsafe the government will have created another class of losing American companies. Too bad the government couldn't stop with the thousands of reasons it lets us know what it thinks of anyone trying to run a business.

This is wrong. The embargo is not supposed to apply to this, they are sending money to the US while buying US services. The embargo is supposed to forbid the sales of products and specific technologies to them.

Applying embargo for domain names, or internet services is just plain stupid.

1. It will not stop them from being online, they will just use other TLD2. It sends a huge bad message to the world not to host or do business with the US

The only one damaged are US companies. This Obamanation government is surely doing everything it can to destroy business and the US economy with it.

The standard in US English is that corporations are considered to be singular nouns. You would say 'Intel has released a new processor' not 'Intel have released a new processor'.

It doesn't really matter in the case of the snippet you wanted to go grammar-nazi on though. The 'was' was related to the singular 'action'. You are right that if the author had chosen to use actions (plural) were would have been correct, but he didn't.

The Syrian Computer Society registered .sy domain names for the Syrian Electronic Army's servers, giving the hacker group a national-level domain name (sea.sy) rather than a .com or other non-government address, signifying its status as at least a state-supervised operation.

Being registered under a ccTLD does not inherently imply any unusual involvement from the relevant government. The del.icio.us or redd.it domains certainly did not require extra scrutiny from the US or Italian governments.

There are some ccTLD registrars with stricter rules about how second-level domains are granted, for example .uk or .au. There may even be some that grant second-level domains only to government-sponsored organizations. If .sy is one of them, you need to say that.

This is wrong. The embargo is not supposed to apply to this, they are sending money to the US while buying US services. The embargo is supposed to forbid the sales of products and specific technologies to them.

Applying embargo for domain names, or internet services is just plain stupid.

1. It will not stop them from being online, they will just use other TLD2. It sends a huge bad message to the world not to host or do business with the US

The only one damaged are US companies. This Obamanation government is surely doing everything it can to destroy business and the US economy with it.

You had me right until you dragged Obama into this... where did that come from? This is a private company making a decision based on a fairly standard set of trade restrictions. Embargos of this type aren't new to the current administration and it seems unlikely the president had a hand in helping this company interpret what such a restriction means in the digital age.

This is wrong. The embargo is not supposed to apply to this, they are sending money to the US while buying US services. The embargo is supposed to forbid the sales of products and specific technologies to them.

Applying embargo for domain names, or internet services is just plain stupid.

1. It will not stop them from being online, they will just use other TLD2. It sends a huge bad message to the world not to host or do business with the US

The only one damaged are US companies. This Obamanation government is surely doing everything it can to destroy business and the US economy with it.

The Republicans are doing a better job destroying the middle-class. Since 1980 middle-class wages have stagnated and fallen despite record profits for companies and on Wall St.

The disparity between rich and poor have grown as a result, rich getting richer and everyone getting poorer. Even if the so-called job creators use their mad wealth to create jobs, they either don't pay the living wage or stagnate wages.

Company profits are only a good thing when the average worker benefits from that growth. Instead, we cut taxes on the rich and they cut our pay to boost profits for their rich friends on Wall St.

All the while funding for education is converted from grants and direct funding to loans, so bank and lenders can profit, while taking no risk - if the student defaults the federal government picks up the bill.

Trillions spent on the war on drugs started by Republicans. Billions spent incarcerating millions of non-violet small time drug offenders, money better spent on high-education.

How we'll compete for the white collar jobs of the future as a bunch of ignorant hicks is beyond me, because those blue collar high school level manufacturing jobs are never coming back, unless you like Chinese wages.

We use taxes to invest in our common future. The rich make a disproportional amount of wealth by suppressing wages and laying off workers. Trickle-down economics doesn't work.

But I'm not talking about redistribution of wealth, I'm talking about using those taxes to invest in the common good, education, infrastructure, which business benefits from - businesses benefit from education that many will never be able to pay off with their sub-standard wages. Now it's time for them to accept some of the burden that they benefit from at our expense.

I call that the trickle-up economics. They benefit from our achievement and well being.

In fact another reason not to do business in the USA. It costs LESS for ebay.com sellers from China to ship many items to the USA than it costs to mail the item within the USA. Now USA sellers will have to collect sales tax creating another reason US companies are losers. Once a domain registered in the USA is unsafe the government will have created another class of losing American companies. Too bad the government couldn't stop with the thousands of reasons it lets us know what it thinks of anyone trying to run a business.

Just FYI: The internet sales tax bill only passed the Senate and the House is in no rush to even consider it yet. There is a fair amount of opposition in the house.

[quote="....snip....Trillions spent on the war on drugs started by Republicans. Billions spent incarcerating millions of non-violet small time drug offenders, money better spent on high-education....snip .[/quote]

damn, I know it's a spelling error, but do we let the violet coloured ones free?

[quote="....snip....Trillions spent on the war on drugs started by Republicans. Billions spent incarcerating millions of non-violet small time drug offenders, money better spent on high-education....snip .

damn, I know it's a spelling error, but do we let the violet coloured ones free?[/quote]

Good one!

We'd still have the highest rate of incarceration in the world even if we let the "violet" coloured ones go free.

... and back to Syria were no one is free. Not even a domain name. Sorry for the diversion.

[quote="....snip....Trillions spent on the war on drugs started by Republicans. Billions spent incarcerating millions of non-violet small time drug offenders, money better spent on high-education....snip .

damn, I know it's a spelling error, but do we let the violet coloured ones free?

Good one!

We'd still have the highest rate of incarceration in the world even if we let the "violet" coloured ones go free.

... and back to Syria were no one is free. Not even a domain name. Sorry for the diversion.

Be fair--he may be trying to be politically neutral. After all, violet is the midpoint between blue and red on the color wheel...

[quote="....snip....Trillions spent on the war on drugs started by Republicans. Billions spent incarcerating millions of non-violet small time drug offenders, money better spent on high-education....snip .

damn, I know it's a spelling error, but do we let the violet coloured ones free?

Good one!

We'd still have the highest rate of incarceration in the world even if we let the "violet" coloured ones go free.

... and back to Syria were no one is free. Not even a domain name. Sorry for the diversion.

Be fair--he may be trying to be politically neutral. After all, violet is the midpoint between blue and red on the color wheel...

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.